Adam Byram is a software developer in Oak Ridge, TN. These days, he's making our healthcare system better at his day job and experimenting with VR/AR in his free time. You can get in touch via Twitter or Google+.

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What’s a Wiki?

Recently I started working to build a wiki using C# & SQL Server. It turns out, such a task is quite easy, at least up until this point (pulling text from the database, wikifying it and then displaying it)…but I started thinking about something… How many of you out there even know what a “wiki” is? And of those of you that do know what it is, do you use one?

For those who don’t know, a wiki is basically a knowledge base (at least the ones I’ve seen are) where everyone can create, edit, and delete content. Think MSDN, but without “official” editors, layout people etc, where if you saw a mistake in an article, you could just go in and change it right then (sometimes without even being logged in) and then it’s all up to date and correct instead of having to resubmit the whole article etc. and without having to make the author of the original text come back and fix things later. I’m not sure I’m explaining that very clearly, so the best thing you can do if you want to know about about them is to check out the best known wiki, the Wikipedia:

That wiki is an online encyclopedia that all the readers are helping to build. It’s really quite nice…notice the “edit” link at the top of all the pages…you can actually just go in there and make whatever changes you think are needed…pretty nifty idea huh?

If you want to know all about wikis in general, check out the “wiki” entry of Wikipedia here.

Adam Byram is a software developer in Oak Ridge, TN. These days, he's making our healthcare system better at his day job and experimenting with VR/AR in his free time. You can get in touch via Twitter or Google+.